According to Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen: "No democracy with a free press has ever suffered a famine, whereas tyrannies and colonial regimes have."  This is a remarkable observation.  It means that there is a solution for one of the three great scourges of humanity.  The other two scourges being war and pestilence.  If Sen is right and we can decrease famine by moving toward democracy we need to be asking: "how can we increase the number of people living in democracies?"And then working to make it happen.

One way is to let people have the option to move away from tyrannies and colonial regimes and into democracies.  This will have two significant effects.  The first is that the lives of the people who move will be greatly improved.  The second is that the regimes that they abandon will be under immense pressure to change the behavior that make their citizens want to leave.  In recent history we have seen a clear example of this occuring.

In 1989 when the East Germans were allowed to emigrate through Hungary to West Germany the East German regime collapsed in a matter of months and the Berlin Wall was torn down.  

In Korea today the non-democratic North is on the brink of another famine.  There are as many as a million North Korean illegal aliens living in hiding in China.  South Koreans should begin to do today what the Germans did in 1989.  They should welcome all North Korean immigrants who want to emigrate.  I predict it would be a matter of months before the North Korean government collapsed a famine would be averted and freedom and prosperity would increase in the world.  In a very short time the only people left in North Korea would be Kim Il Jong and the old General in the ill fitting uniform we always see him with.

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